Driving Plan 9

Glenda_lives_on writes "OSnews has an alternative OS review on Plan 9. Plan 9 is a research OS produced by Bell Labs. It was open sourced a few years back, and has enjoyed a revival of sorts. Los Alamos National Labs is continuing to favor Plan 9 for their new generation of super computing because its the fastest thing out there. I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however, and lacks some graphical refinement. Plan 9 is a very cool and a interesting test drive however. Its definitely worth the price of admission (free) for exploring, and education."

Comments

Has to be asked...

[writermike]

Were Plans 1-8 "not entirely successful?"

"You see! You see! Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!"

Re:Has to be asked...

[Mike Savior]

If they had used letters, I wonder how many times the developers would have purposely bombed the project just so they could get away with calling it "Preparation H"...

Re:Has to be asked...

[ems2]

...considering that there were 10 versions of UNIX from Bell Labs research...

Re:Has to be asked...

[ratatask]

The prior plans were unix. (up to about 8th edition, where they
decided to try something new instead of polishing the old turd)
(unfortunatly that's what the current unixes are based on )

Re:Has to be asked...

[pedalman]

Were Plans 1-8 "not entirely successful?

It could be worse. I still wonder about the poor bastards who were in the clinical trials for Preparations A-G.

Re:Has to be asked...

[mengel]

While there's a clear Ed Wood movie reference, the reason it's something-9 is that it was the Next Thing after Version 8 Unix, which was the Bell Labs release after Version 7 Unix, the one that Started It All. So clearly, rather than call it Version 9 Unix, when it wasn't really Unix underneath anymore, etc. they needed a new name...

Surely...

[isecore]

... Ed Wood must be proud :)

Plan 9 ISO Mirrors

[ettlz]

Before y'all go pulling down the ISO to try it out, the mirrors are listed at http://netlib.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mirrors/ind ex.html .

Re:Plan 9 ISO Mirrors

[ems2]

Not really. You can find ones for slightly outdated releases for bit torrent. Bell Labs makes a new release of Plan 9 nightly and hasn't had any bandwidth problems (the day Lucent has bandwidth problem would be the end a very bad day). The only problem is that the server for Plan 9 is some old crap that apparently doesn't have enough memory all the time. If the server is having problems you should email Lucent management and tell them you are interested in Plan 9 and they should put more money towards the project.

Now YOU look stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Plan 9 is a reference to the Ed Wood movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space, often regarded as the worst movie of all time. Aliens raise the dead to finally prove to humans that they exist (because that's certainly the most obvious, effective way to do it).

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that the "Your stupid minds! STUPID! STUPID!" line is a quote from the movie, I suspect the OP knew that.

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[andreMA]

Actually I took the "not entirely successful" to be a reference to the TOS episode The Ultimate Computer, where (when discussing the M-5) Kirk asks Daystrom (the inventor) about M-1 through M-4. Daystrom responds that they were "not entirely successful"

I thought it was funny, playing one of the cheesier TOS episodes against the extremely cheesy Plan 9 From Outer Space

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[gkhan1]

Ahh, but you are mistaken in your praise of Plan 9, most of us Ed Wood aficionados knows that that isn't his masterpiece, indeed it is trivial in comparison to the behemoth of Glen or Glenda (also known on sensational posters as "I Changed My Sex!"), wherein Wood himself stars as transvestite and Bela Lugosi is an insane rambling doctor.

All jokes aside, Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[lahi]

And if a Danish university CS department was ever to make a research operating system, either cloned from Plan 9, based on something else, or from scratch, I will hereby propose it be called ReptilicOS.

-Lasse

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[writermike]

Yeah, I did know the "stupid minds" quote was from "Plan 9 from Outer Space" but one of the other posters was right when he said that the first quote was from TOS Star Trek's "The Ultimate Computer." FWIW, I wasn't trying to go for a Wood/Trek mashup. I had initially thought the line "Plans 1 - 8" was from "Plan 9," but I had remembered them from the same movie. Ah well...

Re:Now YOU look stupid.

[SEE]

Plan 9 from Outer Space, often regarded as the worst movie of all time.

Only by those who have been spared Manos: The Hands of Fate.

OS good, but all the desktop wallpapers...

[jpellino]

... are cheesy 10 ft tall silver curtains.

Plan 9 is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used it, but Plan 9 offers a radically different archival storage system called Venti.

Basically it never deletes old blocks of data from the server. Blocks are write-once, identified by a really large hash (collisions are so improbable that the possibility can be totally ignored). This allows you to copy lots of redundant data to the server (such as periodic backups) without worrying about the storage space. If the blocks were ever copied there before and they have not changed, they won't take up any space!

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[rylin]

Sounds a bit like ZFS.
Never mind which was first, ZFS is available today.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[Anarke_Incarnate]

How much is this......Venti? Is it MUCH more expensive than a Tall?

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[ciroknight]

Both are available today, and I can assure you Plan 9's Venti was first, and furthermore ZFS isn't really anything like it. Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request. With an appropriate block size set, it can save lots and lots of space, however, it's very impractical as a day-to-day filesystem due to the datasets most people work with day-to-day (most of us work with lots of non-redundant data such as code files, video files, image files, etc.), though it would be a neat experiment to see what could be done with a modernized version of it.

Lots of things like this were/are revolutionary about Plan 9, simply because they were given the ability to do it. Some of them are great ideas (like Venti in conjunction with a database server, if the database server was tailored to the file system and didn't do stupid things...), and some of them could still use a great deal of work. Either way, I welcome our Plan 9 overlords from Outer Space.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely that introduces a single point of failure, though? If one of those single blocks gets corrupted, all that wonderfully redundent data you had on your machine is now all corrupt in exactly the same way.

Of course, I assume the Plan9 developers thought of that too, and there are provisions in the design for this sort of thing.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[retro128]

Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request.

That sounds like a hell of a lot of overhead. With so much stuff going on, what do the performance benchmarks of this fs look like? Doesn't it pretty much guarantee fragmentation? I mean, if you have a lot of redundant data there is no way it can be contiguous with all of the files that it belongs to. As you mentioned, the point is likely moot because I'd like to believe most users try to avoid having a lot of redundant data on their drives.

IMHO, given what you had said, I don't think Venti is at all appropriate for Joe Average everyday user. It's probably more efficient to compress and decompress files in realtime. However, I'm sure there are applications (storing of large amounts of test data perhaps?) that Venti could really be useful.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[inKubus]

The whole OS is mainly designed to run across multiple computers on a network. It abstracts everything into a file, way more than unix. It's designed for large scale environments and not single user stuff.

Also, there is a PDF detailing the Fossil archival server and Venti FS.

It's totally cool.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[hey!]

No, but the CDs are roasted way too dark. Of course some say that Americans are just too parochial to appreciate properly carmelized bits, but of course if it's so much better that way, why does their port of mkisofs have the --with-mocha and --with-vanilla-syrup options?

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[mkosmul]

If I recall correctly, UTF-8 was invented by the people who created Plan 9. I think that's a great example of a smart idea, too - get Unicode support while staying ASCII-compatible. Without UTF-8, most of the standard UNIX tools would need some dramatic changes in order to be able to handle Unicode. With UTF-8, they worked right aways if you didn't care about characters vs bytes, and handled characters vs bytes correctly after just a few changes (most of them in locale data and not the programs themselves, probably).

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[Anonymous Coward]

If you used Venti directly to store all your files, it'd probably perform rather poorly. But on Plan 9, it works as merely an archival backup of the main filesystem called Fossil. You run directly off Fossil and do a daily push to Venti. Then, if you need to get a file that was deleted or whatever, you access Venti.

Re:Plan 9 is cool

[redcane]

Since you find the block by it's checksum, if it was written incorrectly the checksum will tell you so. Since you will never write over it software corruption is basically a non-issue. You would presumably be using this file system on a high redundancy medium, or doing regular back ups of the data that had changed.

How does it compare with the SavaJe OS

[dreamer33]

Does it provide easy portability of applications? How does it compare with Savaje OS? I know Savaje is a comletely Java based operating system with a low enough foot print for any space sensitive applications.

Re:How does it compare with the SavaJe OS

[ems2]

There is APE for POSIX support. And linuxemu for emulating linux binaries.

I personally have not checked out Savaje OS. Inferno would be most comparable to such an OS. Inferno is based on many of Plan 9's ideas but with a new programming language, Limbo (famed for being the only other language than C Dennis Ritchie documented) and a virtual machine, Dis. Limbo can run on bare hardware without a host operating system with around 700KB of memory.

Rob Pike explains the advantages of the Dis virtual machine. Unlike the .Net and Java virtual machines which are stack based Dis is register based. This allows it to run on bare hardware and doesn't require a (according to some heavyweight) operation to translate it from stack to register. Dis provides virtually infinite registers like Parrot. For more information read Pike's paper, The design of the Inferno virtual machine.

Re:How does it compare with the SavaJe OS

[perseguidor]

what

Re:How does it compare with the SavaJe OS

[anothy]

huh. outside of conversations i've had with one other guy here at work, i've not heard anybody mention SavaJe in years. brief history:

around 1996, some of the folks at Bell Labs who worked on Plan 9 started a related project called Inferno. it took the same ideas contained in Plan 9 (and much of the current implementation) and wrapped them up in a virtual machine (Dis), new application programming language (Limbo), different graphics programming system (tk), and some other changes. Plan 9 and Inferno fed each other healthily for quite some time. Inferno was handed over to a business unit in Lucent to try to make a product out of. despite significant technical progress, the BU failed at pretty much all their business goals, and subsequently collapsed. Inferno was used internally in a few projects, and Vita Nuova got the rights to do ongoing development, worldwide distribution, and so on. a few folks from the Inferno BU went off and founded SavaJe, taking the then-currnet copy of the source with them to use as a base. SavaJe has evolved entirely independently since then, and isn't really related now.

i don't really like Java, but for what it's worth, i think if you're going to build a java-bassed device what those guys are doing is exactly the right way to do it: build it in low level, push for full J2EE (not J2ME).

The notion of good research

[DrSkwid]

man page != implementation

http://cm.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/emacs

NAME
        emacs - editor macros

SYNOPSIS
        emacs [ options ]

DESCRIPTION
        This page intentionally left blank.

SOURCE
        MIT

SEE ALSO
        sam(1), vi(1)

BUGS
        Yes.
Copyright © 2006 Lucent Technologies. All rights reserved.

and vi(1) isn't what you might think either

Re:The notion of good research

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubish. EMACS is Editor MACroS. It was originally a set of TECO macros. People can't just backronym it.

Re:The notion of good research

[Al Dimond]

Yeah, I couldn't believe TFAuthor wrote that. I fired up my Plan 9 box just to make sure it wasn't true.

The vi thing I found a long time ago; at first I thought it was to prevent anyone from porting vi to their system but since realized that it was just a result of the naming convention for their development tools.

Oh, slashdot

[Zouden]

I have downloaded and ran Plan 9 before. In fact the Plan 9 live cd sits here on my desk. Its not an operating system for noobs however

What is this, digg?

Re:Oh, slashdot

[thebluesgnr]

No, but it's Sunday.

Zzzzzzz.....

[countach]

The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.

What was good about the "everything is a file" metaphor was not the "file" part, but the "everything is a...." part.

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system. It would be something like a Lisp OS but with an object database type file system. I think some have existed in academia, but I've never looked into them.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[ems2]

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- Ken Thompson

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[ettlz]

The all-encompassing namespace isn't a new thing, no, viz. UNIX and NT. I think Plan 9's revolutionary idea is taking the "everything is a file" idea and distributing it (devices, files, everything) across many physical machines. Does even VMS clustering have this ability?

As for the holy-grail object systems (with all the bellen and whistlen such as orthogonal persistence) there were projects like EROS, Coyotos, etc., and some early projects like DERA's Ten15.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Bobjects]

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.

Smalltalk-80 fits that description pretty well. See:
http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81 /design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html

Smalltalk-80's modern descendent is Squeak:
http://www.squeak.org/

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[ratatask]

>The "everything is a file" metaphor of Unix was revolutionary at the time, and Plan 9 taking it a little further really does little to advance the state of the art.

Sorry, this is where you're wrong.
Make the socket interface a filesystem, and all you do is mount a fileserver over that, to create
a socks proxy/http proxy/whatever. All apps get the capability of
doing networking over a proxy, transparently - no need for using libs or
prelinking hacks that usually don't work.

Have the ability to easily create fileservers in userspace, and create an mail
filesystem that can handle imap/pop/local mboxes etc. Mail clients doesn't need
to reimplement your favorite mail protocol in yet another broken and incompatible
way, or adhere to 4 different libraries with 4 different concepts. Just read/write files and
have the one fileserver do the job.

Sharing files AND resources becomes easy too. Want to play sound on another computer ? import hostname:/dev/audio /dev

Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private
namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[try_anything]

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.

What's cool about "everything is a ..." is that code and understanding for dealing with one entity (such as disk files) can be applied toward other entities (such as network connections). "Everything is an object" only helps if the objects share important characteristics that make them similar to work with. Using a basic definition of "object" -- a piece of data and operations for manipulating it -- Unix qualifies as an "everything is an object" operating system. The operations (i.e., system calls) that may be applied to an object depend on its type (file descriptor, process, network device, etc.) with no operations that may be applied to all objects, leaving no common logic for interacting with the objects. "Everything is a foo" is only helpful if there is a useful set of operations that can be applied to all foos.

"Everything is a bar," on the other hand, would be very useful, because even if they don't have good beer, every bar has someplace to take a leak.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[spitzak]

Actually Plan 9 does far better than "everything is an object". In Plan 9 everthing is a subclass of a certain base object, called a "file". Programs can assumme a set of useful functions, such as the ability to copy an object, that actually makes this api useful, rather than an academic experiment.

About all that "everything is an object" means is that it wont crash if you send the id for one type of object to an api designed for another type, instead you will get an error. Really the only difference between "everything is an object" and all existing operating systems is that the pool of id's for resources is shared between all types of resources.

There are certainly real usable object-oriented systems where there is a base class, but these then imply that "everything is an x" where x is that base class. And so far none of them have as simple of a base class as the Plan 9 file, or one that can actually be understood and used directly by a programmer rather than having to figure out the subclassing api.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Jeremi]

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- Ken Thompson

Hmm, how does one subclass a file to customize its behaviour? Or hide its implementation details by marking them private? Or call methods on it?

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[ak3ldama]

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- Ken Thompson [bell-labs.com]
So is Ken Thompson then confusing a persisting object with a file? The discussion is about having everything be an object. I would guess that the Ken Thompson quote is taken out of context. Having everything be an object, including files, would allow a file to be subclassed as some sort of metadata object for various uses.
Having a file be a persistent object, in this respect, would allow the file to be referenced through a different class or interface than may have been originally intended.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Ant P.]

Directories? chmod? open()?
It worked for udev/sysfs/procfs.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[waveclaw]

What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.

Why is a file not an "object"?

I don't get this. We call them 'files' and try to think of them as pieces of paper and folders as boxes, but the things on out harddrives are very different from their real-world analogs. They are abstract collections of data.

There are well known methods for getting information about a file: name, contents, attributes. There are well known methods forming an orthogonal action set upon a file: move/rename, delete, make, get/set contents, enumerate attributes. Files (directories) can contain other files in a 'has a' relation. However, filesystems use workarounds for 'is-a' relationships: mime types (like object dictionaries,) filename extensions (like C++ name mangling,) extended ACLs. Filesystems are usually class to instatiation vs. mutli-level or mutli-sourced inheritance. But inheritance could be considered to occur only in the abstract as you instantiate a particualr class to make an object or create a specific file of a given type. What is the difference in managing 'is-a' relationships by maniplating a meta-information system such as language keywords in source code and editing patterns in the magic keyword database?

Filesystems are just databases managed by software in the operating system. Is it an issue with the heirarchial interface to filesystems? Other interfaces like relational (bunch of tables) or object (hide random pile behind a query manager) have been restricted to niches like application data and IPC, respectively. And if they suck so bad, why are hierarchial filesystems used to store those relational databases, object repositories and their logfiles? These hierarchial filesystems map so well to 'real-world" storage systems that a common class in an OOS is the 'file,' acting as a gateway out of the applcation's process space and into the external world.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[renoX]

Except that normal objects have a complex interface (public methods) whereas files are restricted to read/write interface.
So these two things are very different..

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Foolhardy]

NT does have an "everything is an object" metaphor, at least for things exported from kernel to user mode. The Object Manager defines a class for such objects, of which object types are subclasses. Kernel mode components are free to define their own object types. The Object Manager defines the interface for common object functions and the owner of each specific object type defines an interface for specific functions (usually by way of syscalls).

Each object type has a set of function pointers for optional methods that the object type (the object class) can choose implement to override the standard object behavior. Every object has an optional name in the unified hierarchical object namespace, and can choose to become an extension of that namespace by implementing the Parse method. Every object has a security descriptor, which the Object Manager can handle automatically, or the object itself can handle when the Security method is implemented. An object can also be synchronized against (have a thread wait for signalling) by using an appropriate dispatcher header, or not by always denying SYNCHRONIZE access. The Object Manager also provides a unified method of sharing objects between processes by way of duplicating handles, which the object type can participate in by implementing the Open and Close methods.

As for subclassing, the object type would have to provide its own support. The IO Manager can do this in a way with device and file objects. A device object is backed by a layered set of drivers that implement different functions by passing a user request (an IRP) down the device stack where each driver can modify or split the request as necessary. Each driver in the stack could represent different classes, with the bottommost driver being the base class and the topmost driver the most derived class, free to override any operation. With the device as the class, the files created from it are the objects, and the functions IOCTLs. Constructor arguments can be implemented by the filename or with extended attributes (like TDI does it). With some conventions, it would be possible to implement a full class-object system in this way.

See:
Object Manager, Microsoft Windows Internals (Fourth Edition)

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[killjoe]

You may see this as a shortcoming but it's really not. What if every file was actually an object? You would have to keep track of what each object was, you would have to catalog the public interface of every file, you would have to rewrite every single application everytime a new class was created so it could deal with the new objects.

Programs like grep, sed, vi, etc would instantly become useless because they would have to know about every single class in the system, past present and future!.

It would be a nightmare. Besides people can do this now with python, ruby, perl or other scripting languages. There is no reason you can't use pickle, or yaml to dump ruby objects and then read them back with ruby. There are already shells written in perl and python and ruby.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[renoX]

'A shortcoming' imply a value judgement, I just said that files having a very rigid interface are not true objects, that's all.

Just a remark: the read/write interface is well suited to console/script interaction, but now applications have mostly moved to GUI, where the 'everything is a file' is not so useful: as evidenced by the fact that Plan9 didn't manage to fit a 'mozilla' like web browser in their setup.

Also, the textual interface while being very useful has also some inherent difficulties: many script which parse the output of say 'ps' are very fragile in fact, because the text output of this command is not very good (well maybe with the adequate option, it is easy to parse, but this isn't helped with the dozens of possible options)..
Text interface are very good for human interfaces, but let's not forget that they have sometimes some downside too..

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[spuzzzzzzz]

Just pulling stuff out of my ass here, but...

The superclass, File say, would have all the methods that we normally associate with files. That is, it would represent the file as a stream of bytes that you can read from or write to. Since many files are plain text files anyway, all the normal ways of processing text apply.

Then you could have the ImageFile subclass, for example, which supports a method "Pixmap ImageFile::RenderImage ()". If the OS has the right libraries installed, it will abstract away from png, jpeg, etc. files. Of course, you can access the raw byte stream if you want, and render the image yourself. And you can detect the image type and look up the APIs for every different image rendering library out there (and if you want some very advanced feature, you probably will). But I think the file-with-a-type idea makes most things much simpler.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Jeremi]

It worked for udev/sysfs/procfs

Well, if by "worked" you mean they were able to extend the kernel to do clever things and have the results look like files, then sure. But in something that is meant to be functionally equivalent to persistent objects, I would expect to be able to do all of the above from any userland application.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[cryptoluddite]

Having all resources being files, you get a standard way of access control (add ACLs if you really need to), couple it with private namespaces, and you don't need the umpten hacks like freebsd jails, chroots, selinux, systrace, etc. Just use chmod/chown and set up a filesystem namespace only containing the resources (resources in this case is anything you request from the OS - networking interface, audio device, screen display, authentication privileges, or most other of the 400 syscalls or ioctls you might want to restrict access to in a read/change on traditional unixes.

Congratulations. You've just invented objects (only crappy ones). If you think that's cool you should check out Java ClassLoader, for instance... you can do all the things you mention for files and more. In Ruby you can call .write method regardless of whether the object is a file or socket or audio device or pipe or graphics device handle or whatever. You can add new methods like you add files to a plan 9 filesystem, the only difference is that it's ridiculously easy.

The main problem I have with Plan 9 is how little actual progress there is. It's like when the old geezer comes up with the same idea over and over again. It's just kinda sad really (check out Squeak for example).

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[njh]

There was an operating system back in the 80s called 'Walnut' which had everything as persistent objects with various economy things like rent and capabilities. If you (or another process) didn't pay an object's rent, the object would die. It was quite interesting though not really developed to the point that people could use it.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[countach]

If you really want to interface with things via a crappy grep/sed interface, you can always do a toString() on an object. This will allow you to retain all the bugs that traditional shell script sed/grep parsing programs have always have. But if you want to move up in the world you could use a useful interface to the object.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[killjoe]

In that case you would be exactly where you are now. You could do common things like read lines, read bytes, write lines, write bytes, check for EOF etc but for anything more sophisticated you would need some code that knew about the file. No different then what you have now. Right now I could serialize and object written in any language and save it to a file. In order to do anything with that file other then read bytes or lines I would have to have the original language and perhaps the serialization routine.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Anonymous Coward]

>I would expect to be able to do all of the above from any userland application.
lot's of the fileservers serve are in user space, like rio, acme, and other stuff like
the usb drivers.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[spuzzzzzzz]

You could do common things like read lines, read bytes, write lines, write bytes, check for EOF etc but for anything more sophisticated you would need some code that knew about the file. No different then what you have now.

The difference would be in the way the information is organised and presented. Anything you do in an object-oriented language can be done in a procedural language. But the object-oriented way of organising and viewing a program can sometimes be more intuitive and useful.

Right now I could serialize and object written in any language and save it to a file. In order to do anything with that file other then read bytes or lines I would have to have the original language and perhaps the serialization routine.

And that could* be very useful if

• there were a good way of dealing with these objects from the shell
• these sorts of objects were used system-wide

Think, for example, of how many useless lines of ad-hoc parsers there are in a modern *NIX system. Every start-up script and every program with a configuration file has some sort of parser built in. With a more powerful way of structuring data at the operating system level, these things could be done more elegantly and more robustly

* Of course, I don't know if it _would_ be useful, never having used such a system

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Hugo Graffiti]

Make the socket interface a filesystem, and all you do is mount a fileserver over that, to create a socks proxy/http proxy/whatever. All apps get the capability of doing networking over a proxy, transparently - no need for using libs or prelinking hacks that usually don't work.

I used to work on the System V /proc filesystem. I was really ugly because everything useful all went through a massive ioctl switch. Check out what the Plan 9 folk themselves say:

Nonetheless, it is possible to push the idea of file-based computing too far. Converting every resource in the system into a file system is a kind of metaphor, and metaphors can be abused. A good example of restraint is /proc, which is only a view of a process, not a representation. To run processes, the usual fork and exec calls are still necessary, rather than doing something like

cp /bin/date /proc/clone/mem

The problem with such examples is that they require the server to do things not under its control. The ability to assign meaning to a command like this does not imply the meaning will fall naturally out of the structure of answering the 9P requests it generates. As a related example, Plan 9 does not put machine's network names in the file name space. The network interfaces provide a very different model of naming, because using open, create, read, and write on such files would not offer a suitable place to encode all the details of call setup for an arbitrary network. This does not mean that the network interface cannot be file-like, just that it must have a more tightly defined structure.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[killjoe]

"The difference would be in the way the information is organised and presented."

I really don't think so. Right now the OS knows all the metadata it needs to know. At best you are adding to that metadata.

"there were a good way of dealing with these objects from the shell"

There is. cat filename | perl -e (or some such equivalent in python or ruby)

"these sorts of objects were used system-wide"

Facism doesn't work in OSS. How are you going to force everybody to use the same format for anything? The only place facism works is in windows where MS can dictate to all their developers how they have to do things but even then it doesn't work too well. Look how messy the registry has gotten, hell look at how many MS divisions disobey the MS look and feel guidelines. Look at how MS chucks their old conventions every two years and embraces some new buzzword.

I guess facism doesn't work in any OS.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[spuzzzzzzz]

"The difference would be in the way the information is organised and presented."
I really don't think so. Right now the OS knows all the metadata it needs to know. At best you are adding to that metadata.

Yes, the OS knows all the metadata it needs to know. It just isn't presented in a very friendly manner, especially to people writing programs and scripts.

"there were a good way of dealing with these objects from the shell"
There is. cat filename | perl -e (or some such equivalent in python or ruby)

The whole point of persistent objects is to provide a nicer, more uniform interface. Something like

echo 'print (pickle.load (open ("filename"))).lookup ("data_key")' | python -m pickle

isn't nearly as easy as, say

filename->lookup ("data_key")

(where, in this example, filename is a file representing a table). Therefore, the existing ways of dealing with these objects from the shell are not "good."

"these sorts of objects were used system-wide"
Facism doesn't work in OSS. How are you going to force everybody to use the same format for anything?

How did the inventors of UNIX force everybody to use flat files for all their data storage? By designing a system in which that model was integrated, consistent and made sense. If someone were to design and create a system based around the notion of persistent objects, the users of that system would use persistent objects system-wide. I don't see how that's fascist. The purpose of my statement was that persistent objects only make sense if there is a consistent system-wide interface.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[Nevyn]

Having everything be an object, including files, would allow a file to be subclassed as some sort of metadata object for various uses. Having a file be a persistent object, in this respect, would allow the file to be referenced through a different class or interface than may have been originally intended.

Inheritance == mount --bind. directories are implied by "files", thus it should be obvious how you have collections (== classes) of files (== methods). Private methods == no privilages.

As the saying goes, "Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[ratatask]

Sure, you just need the overhead (in java) of loading policies in memory for all your restrictions.
And how do I acces the objects from whatever other language easily ? being able to write
netcat in 7 lines of shell script is nice. So is every other application that can
naturally deal with files.

With ruby/java/ you're restricted to "cool" things from
within that language and environment only.
I'm sure that's great when you're a -language zealot.
Why don't you jump to, say Common Lisp ? It can, from my experience, do
most things other language can, not the least OO features - only "better".
But it too is a restricted environment in itself, so you probably won't touch it,
just as I won't touch your OO centric language.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[killjoe]

"filename->lookup ("data_key")"

I agree that typing this would be easier but look at what it would involve. First of all the shell would have to be able able to take a string and invoke the lookup method on it. Then the lookup method would have to know that it was dealing with files and not some other string (presumably you could cat something | lookup too). It goes on and on. This would add an insane amount of complexity to your shell.

One option would be to limit your shell to dealing with files and directotories but then again you are unable to do anything other then lookup the dates, sizes, read and write lines etc on them. In other words no different then what you have today.

"How did the inventors of UNIX force everybody to use flat files for all their data storage?"

They didn't. They just wrote tools to deal with flat files (awk, sed, grep, sort, uniq etc) which encouraged the use them.

Re:Zzzzzzz.....

[spuzzzzzzz]

Let's change the example slightly, then; it wasn't well thought-out: put a space before and after "->" Then, the shell only needs to recognise the built-in command "->". Using the dynamic typing facilities provided by the operating system, it checks to see if the object "filename" has a method named lookup. If it doesn't print an error message. If it does, call it. This isn't really any more complicated than looking up the location of an executable in $PATH. It is different to (cat filename | lookup) because the lookup method is no longer specific to that file (or type of file). You will end up with massive namespace collisions if you put every method in the global scope.

They didn't. They just wrote tools to deal with flat files (awk, sed, grep, sort, uniq etc) which encouraged the use them.

And the exact same thing could conceivably happen with an object-based system.

graphical refinement

[nurb432]

Considering its not really intented as a desktop replacement OS, thats by design.

The review is not so great

[ems2]

The review is not so great in terms of accuracy i.e. there is no emacs (check out acme, sam, ed, and smacme instead) and the 640x480 resolution is nonsense. 9fans certainly isn't so grateful about this review.

Check out the Plan 9 documentation if you are interested in understanding Plan 9.

Re:The review is not so great

[andrewzx1]

Hi Ems2, I am the author of the referenced Plan 9 article and I can safely say that 640X480x8 was the default window size that came up.This is fact and not opinion.I think I mentioned that it was easily changed to a higher resolution, either by Rio or by simply typing 800x600x8. I now see that there is a version of emacs available. I referenced an out-of-date posting on the 9fans list (I think). Thanks for the correction. Emacs is a great asset. You will see that I too provided plenty of references to the Plan 9 documentation for people to investigate.

Re:The review is not so great

[ems2]

You are wrong. You are asked what resolution you want. 640x480x8 is just the first option on the list.

Re:The review is not so great

[JoshRoss]

640x480 should be good enough for anyone.

Re:The review is not so great

[ems2]

Yes I should be able to view the stats of a 10,000 computer cluster with that... Plan 9 is one of those place a higher resolutation even if the screen is crap helps a lot.

Re:The review is not so great

[SaDan]

Hey, thanks for the crappy article at OSNews. I've stopped going over there for anything relevant to computers, and wish I hadn't seen this Slashdot submission.

I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

"Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is the proper name of the OS.

Plan 9 is now community driven, albiet from a small community, mostly the same people that have been there all along.

It has USB sound support and AC97 support is a new one on me.

I use it still because the user environment is the best one I have encountered for text editing and interecting with the shell. Most users use VNC to get to their X11/Windows desktops where their web browser lives.

Building a web browser from scratch is one of those never ending tasks that frankly, just isn't worth your while. That said there is Mothra - no tables, no css, no frames etc. that Tom Duff (yes that Tom Duff) wrote many moons ago and one of the community is beavering away at his project Abaco and has moderate success.

One of the main tenets to Plan 9 is "everything is a file" and the system is built around the notion of a distributed name space in the shape of a directory tree rather than being a reflection of the disk contents. The canonical example of this is ftps where the remote ftp site is presented as a directory tree at /n/ftp

Name spaces are process independent so you can build them per process which feels a bit like chrooting.

Exporting a name space is part of the deal, this presents many gifts that were not deliberately shoe-horned in such as remote step debugging across architectures, sending sound to a remote soundcard, importing a remote machine's network stack instead of using a gateway (including non-plan9 machines via ssh), importing remote filesystems (including non plan 9 machines). All this is facilitated by the 9p protocol.

As a micro/macro kernel hybrid all this is achieved in just 37 syscalls which is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to Linux' 300+ (so many they are not even enumerated any more).

Linux is derided in the mailing list ("For amateurs, by amateurs") as well as the failings of the other braindead OSes we have to deal with ("If only they did it like us").

Linus has stopped by in 9fans to whine on about stuff and was seen off, Theo wanted our compilers when he didn't want the license (as imposed by Lucent lawyers) but since they have been dual licensed we've not seen him around.

Inferno isn't plan 9, it's another product built on similar principles that was sold off by Lucent.

Lucent's management of Plan 9 in hindsight could have prevented adoption when it was crucial - it was $300 per copy prior to v. 3 and once a free download had a "copies of all modifications must be sent to Lucent" clause and other annoying restrictions in it. These have been lifted now but they boat could already have sailed.

The notion of distributed computing has gained ground in recent times and Plan 9 could have been at the forefront with distributed computing being built in from the start.

All that said, Plan 9 was never intended as anything more than an experiment and some ideas have slowly crept into other products (or possibly independently invented) - notably Windows XP presenting their stuff as files/folders, ftpfs in Linux, single sign-on.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is derided in the mailing list ("For amateurs, by amateurs") as well as the failings of the other braindead OSes we have to deal with ("If only they did it like us").

I hope you aren't interested in growing the Plan 9 community with an attitude like that.

If you supposedly have a superior OS, you can afford to have some class about it.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[Homology]

> Theo wanted our compilers when he didn't want the license
> (as imposed by Lucent lawyers) but since they have been dual
> licensed we've not seen him around.

Is there any license for the compilers other than
http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/license.html ?

It sure looks it's written by lawyers, though earlier versions was worse ;-)

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

> I hope you aren't interested in growing the Plan 9 community with an attitude like that.

If it bothers you, there's no point in coming.

Plan 9 is based on another idea : "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad" - Rob Pike

> If you supposedly have a superior OS, you can afford to have some class about it.

There's no point calling a turd a diamond to save the feelings of the person who shitted it out.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

The compilers used for Inferno are the same ones :

http://www.vitanuova.com/dist/4e/20060303/utils.tg z

I'm told the licence is different for those (GPL, MIT or something like that), though I have not looked myself.

I think that's the file, the full list is here :

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/downloads.html

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[ttfkam]

There's no point calling a turd a diamond to save the feelings of the person who shitted it out.

However you don't tell someone their house is a shithole that only an idiot would want to live in even if you have a better home proposed. You point out the merits of the new house over and above what they have now.

Otherwise you will be perceived simply as an asshole calling someone an idiot. It might make you feel better, superior, etc., but it guarantees that you and whatever you're bringing to the table will be ignored or actively derided.

You hurt your cause by your presence. People will avoid Plan 9 not for its failings, but because it is associated with assholes, for example, you. If your goal is to kill the project, then by all means continue insulting others because you think they deserve it. If you actually want to foster adoption, perhaps a measure of diplomacy and a modicum of decorum would help.

In short, don't be a dick. As an added bonus, that advice works for more than just software.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[sgtrock]

So, basically you're saying that you have the most impressive OS on the planet and the rest of us are simply idiots for not recognizing just how wonderful it is? Or are you saying that you have the best OS on the planet and your /glad/ that the rest of us haven't recognized that fact so we can't spoil your tiny playground?

Or is it that you hate the fact that an OS built "by amateurs, for amateurs" is somehow eating your lunch at every turn? Are you happy living with an addmittedly experimental OS that doesn't have 99% of the current applications ported to it so you are forced to VNC into a "lesser" OS just to be able to use a decent Web browser??

(shakes head in wonder) And people say Theo is a PITA!

Did it ever occur to you that if Plan 9 truly is that remarkable, a more inclusive, community building spirit might help lift it above Linux in no time? That is the true secret to Linux's continuing success, after all; Richard's and Linus's willingness to include everyone and every project who wishes to contribute. Otherwise you wouldn't have the ability to package a distribution so easily.

If it were simply a matter of being a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago. Nope, Theo and company chased off contributors of all stripes with their collective incredibly elitist attitude a decade ago, and they still keep it up. Sounds to me like you guys took their attitude and inflated it by an order of magnitude.

Here's a clue: Want people to help out in adding functionality and apps? Start treating them decently and give them a reason to contribute.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[heinousjay]

So does this mean the typical derision one gets from the Linux community for things like, say, asking simple questions is really an ironic sort of welcoming embrace meant to bring in the world?

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

Your assumption is that I quote myself, this is erroneous.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[asuffield]

If it were simply a matter of being a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago.

I think you mean: if it were simply a matter of having an idea how to build a better OS, OpenBSD would have flattened Linux a long time ago. The big problem with OpenBSD is that they haven't built most of it; it's sorely lacking in (native) features. It doesn't matter how good or bad your kernel is, emacs and firefox are basically the same on every platform. OpenBSD has so few actual (working) pieces that it's not really any different to yet another Linux platform - except for a handful of low-level tools which tend to be less featureful than the corresponding Linux versions.

The other problem is that these ideas often don't work very well in practice (microkernels are slower and can't actually do anything new, openssl has unreadably foul code, etc). Linux took off because, in practice, it's faster and more featureful than anything else that wasn't specifically designed for the task you're currently trying to do. All these other things may do some things better, but inevitably do all the other things worse, and that's what counts.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

blah blah blah

Your assumption that I quote myself is erroneous.

But yes, I don't care if you use it or not.

Worse is better worked out for Linux & HTTP/HTML

Market share is for marketing people.

Not everyone is trying to dominate the desktop.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[asuffield]

I use it still because the user environment is the best one I have encountered for text editing and interecting with the shell. Most users use VNC to get to their X11/Windows desktops where their web browser lives.

"Instead of driving a car, I get about using a pogo stick. It's much better because you can carry it with you when you're not using it, so you always have it available, and also you can get into smaller spaces than you could with a car. When I need to go someplace that's too far away, I use my car instead."

What exactly is the point if you just use a real OS whenever you need to do something more complicated than text editing?

As a micro/macro kernel hybrid all this is achieved in just 37 syscalls which is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to Linux' 300+

"My pogo stick is assembled using just fourteen screws. This is a source of amusement and a feeling of superiority when compared to the thousands of screws, nuts, and bolts needed to assemble a car."

I can only presume that you are easily amused.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

ignorance is bliss, you must be very happy

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[flakier]

I hope the Linux community isn't interested in growing.

So often I see a windows: by morons, for morons type attitude.

I get your point, but one of the reasons some things are better is *because* they are unfriendly. You can't just go and add pet foo crazy idea into the Linux kernel all that easily. From what I've observed, it is even less easy to get something stupid into Plan 9.

Popularity isn't all that it's made out to be. Plan 9 doesn't want to grow, it wants to be better.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[ems2]

You can also get Plan 9's c compiler (by Ken Thompson) from Inferno. FYI, they are kept in sync. The only difference is the license used with the version bundled with Inferno. The license is based on MIT-template. The text goes as follows:

This copyright NOTICE applies to all files in this directory and subdirectories, unless another copyright notice appears in a given file or subdirectory. If you take substantial code from this software to use in other programs, you must somehow include with it an appropriate copyright notice that includes the copyright notice and the other notices below. It is fine (and often tidier) to do that in a separate file such as NOTICE, LICENCE or COPYING. Copyright © 1994-1999 Lucent Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. Revisions Copyright © 2000-2005 Vita Nuova Holdings Limited (www.vitanuova.com). All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

That's not plan9, that's plan9 ports

The plan9 kernel has 37 syscalls

> No mmap huh? No shared libraries? Er, nice!

That's considered a feature

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master craftsman
employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise requires
sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real applications, and only
practice with these tools will build skill in their use.
            -- Robert L. Kruse, _Data Structures and Program Design_

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[r3dk1ng]

Infero was gear to just about anything with a processor, whereas Plan 9 is gear to large servers. I am surpised that neither of the two are widely mainstream. It would be nice to see more of both. -Rory Savage Bocca Raton Comp-Sci & Reseach

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[IceFoot]

"Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is the proper name of the OS.

To distinguish it from Plan 9 from Outer Space

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[OnanTheBarbarian]

It's really easy to make operating systems elegant if you aren't constrained by the terrible task of supporting a large base of (often old) software and hardware (particularly software).

Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.

However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).

The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[sgtrock]

Worse is better worked out for Linux & HTTP/HTML

Market share is for marketing people.

Not everyone is trying to dominate the desktop.

Hmmm. Interesting. And yet, you care enough to poke everyone in the eye with how lousy you think Linux is that you have to post this for a sig:

GNU/Linux - a printer driver gone horribly wrong

You know, for someone who claims not to care about what the rest of us do or think (i.e. who has the bigger marketshare), you sure seem to have spent a lot of energy thinking about how horrible GNU and Linux are. You sure you aren't just the teensy bit jealous? lol

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[sgtrock]

I think you just proved my point for me: If Theo and company would have been more willing to accept contributions gracefully at the beginning of the OpenBSD project, I contend that many (most? all?) of those problems would have been dealt with a long time ago. Instead, Theo seems driven to make sure that only his vision will prevail, and he doesn't hesitate to slag someone who he disagrees with. He doesn't seem to have learned much about how to play nice with others after being booted from the NetBSD group for his abrasive attitude.

Too bad, because I do respect his ability to code. He's a far better programmer than I could ever hope to be.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

Jealous ?
Nah, I just like the sound of my own lame jokes.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[DrSkwid]

lol, I've told you, I don't care what people think about it.

It is super leet and so am I.

Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user

[Digi-John]

Bingo. If one wants a sample of people who hurt by their presence, search the 9fans list for posts by uriel. That guy is definitely setting the plan9 cause back every time he opens his mouth on that list...

Seconded. However, Uriel appears to have been banned from the list for poor behavior, so perhaps it will be better.

Here's the Plan 9 home page

[chud67]

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

Sounds like what The Hurd was supposed to be...

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Exporting a name space is part of the deal, this presents many gifts that were not deliberately shoe-horned in such as remote step debugging across architectures, sending sound to a remote soundcard, importing a remote machine's network stack instead of using a gateway (including non-plan9 machines via ssh), importing remote filesystems (including non plan 9 machines). All this is facilitated by the 9p protocol [bell-labs.com].

This sounds remarkably similar to what Richard Stallman's The Hurd was supposed to be. [Speaking of which - Duke Nuke'em Forever ain't got nothing on The Hurd.]

In terms of languages that understand transparent network distribution - has anyone ported Erlang [or something similarly modern] to this platform?

Also, are there stripped-down versions of Plan 9 that can function in the RTOS space?

Thanks!

Re:Sounds like what The Hurd was supposed to be...

[Slithe]

> Duke Nuke'em Forever ain't got nothing on The Hurd

Yeah, but the Hurd ain't got nothing on Project Xanadu.

Re:Sounds like what The Hurd was supposed to be...

[DrSkwid]

Plan 9 predates The Hurd

Erlang - don't think so. Limbo & Plan 9 C use CSP channels.

Stripped down plan 9 for RTOS - not as far as I'm aware, it's used more for clustering. LANL use it there, they might be the people to ask.

Plan 9's web browsers

[ems2]

First of all there is Charon from Inferno. It supports html, EMCAScript (1.1 IIRC), CSS, DOM (level 1 IIRC) and https. (See screenshot however this one is a bit outdated)

Abaco is the most actively developed Plan 9 web browser. It supports most of html. DOM level 3 development has been started. Mozilla's Javascript engine has been ported to Plan 9 and can be used today for a Javascript shell. This will provide abaco with Javascript in the future. Work on CSS has started but I do not know what has been done or where it is heading. Abaco has been ported to Linux and friends via Plan 9 from Userspace. Package managers are encouraged to make packages of abaco for their systems. (See screenshot)

Then there are webpage, links, mothra, and htmlfmt.

Finally there are text web browsers for acme (htmlfmt for Plan 9 and see this for Inferno)

In other news, SDL now works on Plan 9.

Re:Plan 9's web browsers

[andrewzx1]

There's no information as to whether charon runs on Plan 9 or only on inferno. As you stated previously, inferno is not Plan 9. Can you reference a binary download for charon or must one build it from source? Is there more information on charon, such as a review? Or is the man page the only documentation available?

Re:Plan 9's web browsers

[ems2]

Inferno can be hosted on other operating systems or run native on its bare hardware. You can install Inferno for Plan 9 and run fgb's script from /n/sources/contrib/fgb/rc/charon (this file can be accessed in the Plan 9 name space after running 9fs sources). This script runs Inferno; binds Plan 9 name space to Inferno's /n/local; binds Plan 9's devices to Inferno's name space; and runs charon in Plan 9's window manager instead of Inferno's window manager. Basically it is like running a Mono application on Linux but a lot more sane.

Re:Plan 9's web browsers

[andrewzx1]

I think you missed my point. My point was whether charon runs under Plan 9 without modification or special provisions.

Re:Plan 9's web browsers

[ems2]

Simple answer no. You just need to install Inferno which installs charon for you. Installing inferno doesn't require any special modifications or special provisions.

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[despisethesun]

Yeah! Fucking assholes! The only OS they should mention more than once is Linux!

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[Zontar The Mindless]

Me either, which is why I downloaded it and started playing with it about 3 weeks ago. In fact, I've got it running off the CD on my spare workstation right now.

For those of you who haven't seen plan 9 yet...

[ChePibe]

Plan 9 is now available for free from Google Video.

I must warn you, however, that everything you will see is based on sworn testimony...

/proc on steroids

[DrDitto]

My university had a visitor from Los Alamos several weeks ago and he gave a live demo of using Plan9 to control a 10,000-machine cluster.

Really cool how _everything_ was a file.

To start a program on some machine, he would cd to some directory corresponding to the machine. I don't remember exactly, but this directory had files corresponding to "exe", "stdin", and "stdout" among others. To start a job, the program was just copied to the exe file. And then if you looked at the "stdout" file, the output from the running job was there. Now you can imagine how launching a job on thousands of machines and collecting the output becomes really trivial.

I got the impression that this was sort of like the Linux /proc filesystem, but expanded to work seamlessly across a cluster and with more functionality.

Re:/proc on steroids

[ems2]

Linux got the idea for /proc from Plan 9. However, it a very dumbed down version of Plan 9's. One of the major differences is that Plan 9's /proc controls processes while Linux really does nothing but represent them to some degree. One example is that you either kill a process by writing 'kill' to its clt (control) file or delete its directory. Plan 9 requires less syscalls thanks to this design. Inferno also has this design to manage its processes. Imagine this with Plan 9's distributing ideas...

Re:/proc on steroids

[spitzak]

Linux copied the idea of /proc *from* Plan9, so there is certainly some resemblance!

Despite the limited nature of the copy (somebody else says that Linux version is pretty much read-only, I'm not sure) it shoud be obvious what a big win this is. Suddenly a whole lot of utilities like "ps" do not have to be recompiled to match the kernel. And you can peek into /proc directly, without using a program, and get useful information (such as what files are open or the executable name, I've done both of these plenty of times).

The only other Plan-9 thing that is copied extensively is UTF-8 text encoding. This one is also a HUGE win, as suddendly we don't have to write two streams through all our programs for handiling Unicode and handling "legacy" ascii files, as they are now the same thing, as long as some (very minor) fixes are done to the "legacy" code. Plus UTF-8 seamlessly handled Unicode going past 65536 characters, while the "wide character" solution that Sun and HP and Dec and Microsoft struggled with for 20 years fell apart the moment this happened, by adding "surrogate characters" and thus deleting the *only* advantage it had over UTF-8.

Considering how incredibly useful both of these ideas are, I would certainly like to see a lot more of Plan 9 brought out into the real world. There is a lot there!

Re:/proc on steroids

[maraist]

While that's really cool and all.. I wonder if that generalization doesn't reduce the flexibility of clustering methods. I can only assume that somewhere it is configured how the machines interact. UNIX used good ole 'rsh hostname command | output' which seems to fullfill the same requirements. UNIX had many tools which were designed to be character stream oriented (cpio, tar, sed, grep) which faciliated this cross-hosting capability. But today, you have to decide whether you're using ssh and whether you're zipping the stream (which algorithm), encrypting the stream (with what algorithm), using which authentication method, etc. It's very nice to be able to
rsync -e 'ssh -C' path1 host:/path2

I'm just saying, while I agree the everything-is-a-file is cool and all, I've found that flexibile configuration is essential.

Re:/proc on steroids

[DarkOx]

Right but this is not new in Plan 9 either. IBM has been doing this with the SYSOUT concept, in the mainframe world for decades. In many respects the concepts and paradigms driving Plan 9 from my adminted limity reading about and playing with the live CD seem to be a cleaver collection of everything good about UNIX coupled with everything good about SYSTEM 390/OS390/MVS/ZOS(Whatever you are calling it this year). Its a pretty cool system, but like most things despite all the industry hype it is not really new.

Re:/proc on steroids

[Apotsy]

If you're referring to surrogate pairs, those are a result of the insistence by Microsoft and IBM at including so many thousands of compatibility characters for their existing character sets. Everything currently in Unicode could have easily fit within 65k chars if it weren't for those two companies. The original vision of Unicode as pushed by engineers from Xerox and Apple (I know some of them) did not include surrogates.

Also, you talk as though UTF-8 were inherently superior to UTF-16 because of the smaller space taken up by ASCII-rage characters. However, for data that is say ... east Asian, UTF-8 is actually larger (characters in the unified Han range take up 3 bytes instead of 2).

Not everyone in the world speaks English, and UTF-8 is not optimal for everyone and every situation. There is more to life that ASCII compatibility.

Re:/proc on steroids

[spitzak]

The surrogate pairs were introduced for the People's Republic of China (PRC) mandated in 2000 that computer systems sold in its territory must support GB18030, which required that computer systems intended for sale in the PRC must move beyond the BMP.

The precomposed characters are a problem, but there are only about 500 of them and they were allocated long ago as part of Unicode (this should be obvious by the low index numbers). We would be better off without them except for the first 256 codes which I think should match ISO-8859-1 and also add the Microsoft CP1252 codes for 0x80-0x9f. All other ones require some translation of the character indexes from legacy 8-bit codes, so I would think the translator could easily decompose them as well.

As for size, even straight Chinese has enough spaces, control codes, latin letters and numbers, etc, that it is shorter in UTF-8 than in UTF-16. Besides, arguing about size is pointless, as with any modern compression all possible encodings of Unicode end up the same size.

The smaller size is NOT the reason for UTF-8. The reason for UTF-8 is to avoid duplicate code paths due to the need to support ASCII, which triples the size and complexity of the code (two code paths plus all the if's to decide on the path), and, far worse, discourages anybody from implementing or debugging I18N because 90% of their users will only use the ascii path. Unfortunatly "politically correct" attitudes like yours have done FAR MORE to prevent I18N than any redneck american programmer ever did. If we had started using UTF-8 in 1980's without all this lamentation that we are punishing the third world by making their characters take more bytes, we would be supporting it everywhere, seamlessly, today.

Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Plan9 runs on Xenopix DVD. Xenoppix runs Plan9 on anonymous PC.

http://unit.aist.go.jp/itri/knoppix/xen/index-en.h tml

Xenoppix is a combination of Virtual Machine Monitor "Xen" and 1CD/DVD "KNOPPIX".
It runs Plan9 and NetBSD on Xen-DomU(GuestOS) and KNOPPIX on XenDom0(HostOS).

Interesting reads.

[ratatask]

In addition to the Plan 9 papers, here's some nice reads:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~fastos/05meeting/PLAN9NOTDE ADYET.pdf
http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/9book.html

Wow, he managed to compile a "Hello, world"

[Lisandro]

Great review guys!

Re:Wow, he managed to compile a "Hello, world"

[andrewzx1]

In my defense I state that I couldn't get Plan 9 to completely install on ANY of the 5 systems I had at hand. Without both a compatible graphics card and a compatible NIC I was unable to attach to a grid resource (9grid.de) and actually do some distributed computing. Which was my original goal. And I think if you try editing a program in ed, you will find "Hello, world" quite impressive 8-)

Re:Wow, he managed to compile a "Hello, world"

[ems2]

You don't have a graphics card which does VESA? Wow. With over 5 computers just wow.

Re:Wow, he managed to compile a "Hello, world"

[andrewzx1]

Maybe you don't realize that although you can run rio in the LiveCD you easily (or at all, I don't know) write to a persistent file system without a full install. I could not get Plan 9 to install on anything but the ancient Thinkpad, and this did not have a supported VGA. No VESA. This whole hardware compatibility problem becomes a non-issue if you can get Plan 9 working in a virtualized environment such as VMWare or Microsoft's now free Virtual PC. But apparently there are issues here as well.

"lacks some graphical refinement"

[metamatic]

"...lacks some graphical refinement..."

Which is a polite way of saying that it's hideously ugly and designed as if the last 20 years of HCI research never happened. I mean, look at those scroll bars.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[ratatask]

Yeah, they don't look like KDE or XP scrollbars.
Oh noes - Therefore they are crap.
Not to mention the look - a scrollbar that looks different
cannot possibly be useful.

Wobbeling,translucent windows seems absent. So does shiny
colors(only colors pleasent on the eyes for long working sessions),
Zoomable icons, taskbars, the X button you accidentally click twice a
day.

Couple this with a person that has unquestionable faith it
The Way It's Always Been Done (aka. this is how osx/xp/gnome/kde works)
and hasn't even spent a day learning different ways - we have a candidate
for Research,Development and Progress.
Congratulation.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[heinousjay]

Your defensive tone doesn't help, and the fact that you simply derided the poster's opinions isn't really a defense anyway.

Why is it so hard for people to admit that whatever it is they like isn't perfect? Such a simple human failing, and it probably causes about 95% of conflict in this world.

We'll never do better while this kind of thinking is around.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[Cid Highwind]

The Way It's Always Been Done (aka. this is how osx/xp/gnome/kde works)

Only on slashdot will you see someone cite a group of 5-7 year old environments (WinXP, Gnome, KDE, OS X) as examples of "The Way It's Always Been Done" and a 20+ year old one (Plan 9) as innovative...

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[LWATCDR]

1. It is a research OS.
2. It isn't about HCI.
3. Most of the modern GUIs also seem to care very little about usability as much as they do about marketing.
The truth is that modern GUIs seem to be more about distraction than actually getting work done. I admit that I to love my eye candy but that isn't what Plan 9 is all about.
Maybe that should be the next step for Plan 9. Since Plan 9 seems to be a great solution for distributed systems maybe some university should take it and start working a research project GUI for it.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[andrewzx1]

More university support for Plan 9 sounds like an excellent idea to further some of the innovative ideas in the OS. U. Calgary has some support as detailed here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~mirtchov/lanlp9/

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[colmore]

I honestly don't mean this as a flame:

If the first thing you look at on a new OS is the GUI, Plan9 is 100% not remotely suited to your interests.

Plan 9 isn't awesome because it's a slick desktop OS, but rather, because writing software for 10,000 computers running in parallel is as easy as writing software for a single box.

Re:"lacks some graphical refinement"

[ratatask]

Yes - this appears to be the environments most users are settlet in, and most users (here) are
familiar with and comparing against. This means it becomes the way it's been done("should be") for
these users.
And the metaphor it centers about is much older than this btw.
It's just being polished and refined, and will likely be so for the next years.
Drop shadows, wobbeling transparent windows, scalable icons - adds little to the value of
getting work done for users.
(sure, it's great for sales persons and the coolness factor to capture users)

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[Slithe]

I love to see Plan 9 mentioned on Slashdot, but I would like an actual news story rather than a post that only says "Hey! This is a cool operating system that has already been mentioned on Slashdot several times since 1998! Check it out!" Plus, I have not yet seen a recent Slashdot story that said "Hey! There is this cool kernel called Linux, written by a Finnish programmer, Linus Torvalds. Check it out!" Which reminds me, I should submit a Slashdot story about Inferno.

Gratsie,Sir

[SpecialBrownies]

That connection to deep space is too slow. Bad wireless, I guess. They should upgrade.

Re:Gratsie,Sir

[ems2]

It has nothing to do with the connection AFAIK. Lucent should have more than enought bandwidth. IIRC it has to do with the old crappy hardware. Believe me Bell Labs has complained many times to Lucent management but those damn shareholders... Why don't you send off an email to Lucent management? Tell them you are interested in Plan 9 and they should put some funding towards Plan 9.

Plan9 on Qemu

[int19h]

If you wish to try out Plan 9 without burning a CD and rebooting, Free OS Zoo offers an image of Plan 9 (108M) that works fine with theQemu emulator.

Step-by-step instructions for a Debian-based distro:

1. sudo aptitude install wget unzip qemu

2. wget http://www.oszoo.org/ftp/images/plan9_060327.zip

3. unzip plan9_060327.zip

4. qemu -net nic -net user plan9/plan9_compressed.img

5. A window with Qemu will pop up. Press Return a few times, and you'll reach the commandline.
   

Other tips:

• Press Ctrl+Alt to toggle mouse-grab
  
• Press Ctrl+Alt+f to toggle fullscreen
  
• Note that Plan9 is intentionally relatively minimalistic, compared to Linux
  

Good luck!

Timing

[shish]

I was wondering why my .iso was only coming in at 5kb/s... It turns out that the day I decide to check out some other OSes is the same day, that only happens once every few years, that someone links to plan9 on the front page of slashdot -_-;

Re:Is this from Outer-space?

[Ruie]

Is this from Outer-space?

Or is it of Earthen origin?

It is from alternative reality called "user space"

To answer some of the authors questions

[ems2]

1) The live cd is the install cd. This isn't Linux... Installation is done by an interactive rc script ("everything is a file") in a running Plan 9 with or without rio. Try and imagine how simple it is to automate a Plan 9 installation. Unlike Linux we don't need Red Hat to develop some complex standard for doing something that should be simple.

2) The cd comes with all the official software. Everything but the stuff that can be found in /n/sources/extra/ or /n/sources/patches/. Or anything made or ported by anyone else that can be found in /n/sources/contrib/ and elsewhere. And it definitely is not missing anything that would be basic in any operating system.

3) It does include ping. Ping is not just limited to IP so you will find multiple ping programs for different things in their respected directories. The ping for IP is in /bin/ip/ like the rest of the IP tools (on x86 the actual location for IP's ping is /386/bin/ip/ping. /386/bin/ is bound to /bin/ during boot up on x86. Likewise /alpha/bin/ is bound to /bin/ during boot up on alpha. etc.). You use IP ping like this: ip/ping $ipadr. If you want skip the ip/ part then bind /bin/ip/ping to /bin/ping.

4) This all fits in 80MB. Plan 9's cd is small because it doesn't have bloat. (This includes: PDF/postscript reader, page; Word processor, troff; an advance shell, rc; a web server, httpd; plus thousands of other applications.)

5) Why didn't you ask any of your questions on 9fans before coming to your assumptions?

6) This isn't Linux there are rules (e.g. ip tools in /bin/ip/ and http tools in /bin/http/) we don't just dump everything where ever we feel like it. What is the point of having a hierarchy without using it?

Re:To answer some of the authors questions

[andrewzx1]

There is one fairly big problem with running the Plan 9 LiveCD. The problem is that you are running as a user that has no access to: a) a persistent file system like /tmp, b) most useful common UNIX tools like ping, emacs, etc, (no path?) c) the user creation app to give yourself more access. And so if you are running the LiveCD as a newbie you have access to very little of the tools that would really help you understand the true extent of Plan 9. Which is quite deep. Instead you are essentially sitting in a sandbox with no toys to play in the sand. This I think defeats the purpose of what a LiveCD should really do, which is to give you a really good experience, very quickly. I don't think you should have to know the specific paths of various utilities in order to have a good LiveCD experience. Perhaps in the future there could be a newbie LiveCD which is more like a guided tour, and less like a jail cell.

Re:To answer some of the authors questions

[bytesex]

I think your experience more or less describes how _anyone_ feels when they're first confronted with an OS. After that's over, I usually only need to know if it has a C compiler on it, and what the quirks are of their libc.

Re:To answer some of the authors questions

[SaDan]

I don't know how many times this has been said, or how you could have possibily missed it, but Plan 9 from Bell Labs is EXPERIMENTAL! It's not mainstream, people don't actively port all the thousands of bits of software that make up a typical Linux distribution.

The first time I used Plan 9 from Bell Labs I did a lot of reading, and ended up with everything working after a couple hours. I think the lack of "wizards" and crap like that made it easier to really appreciate what was going on in this operating system, and it definately forces you to read and grasp some of the concepts that will be foreign to a typical *nix user.

Re:Plan 9, the OS for Smug Elitist Assholes?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Use Plan 9 - we're so arcane we'll always be smug and superior!

He he! It's fun seeing Linux users getting a taste of their own medicine.

Re:the mocking...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

How old is the operating system again? And that's all they have?

He he. Your feeble excuses for criticising OS 9 are hilariously funny. Do you have any more like that?

and of the social resources of the users, hint "none"

Oh I see you do. You should do a stand up routine.

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[LWATCDR]

You might want to take a look at Qemu.
With QEMU you can run Plan 9 as a guest OS under Linux, windows, or Mac OS/X
The more I use Qemu the more I like it. I actually got Vista to run in a window on my Linux desktop. It isn't fast but it worked.
I don't know if they have support for Xen in Plan 9 yet but I do know that Nvidia and Xen don't get along :(

Plan 9 under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

[CodeArt]

Plan 9 installs and runs without any problem with Plan 9 GUI under under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 running on Windows XP SP2. I have created virtual machine with 128MB of RAM. It boots directly from the latest Plan 9 ISO image. I haven't tested with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 but I guess result would be the same. Both virtualization software can be now downloaded for free.

Re:Plan 9 under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2

[andrewzx1]

A problem with MS Virtual PC: At the partdisk prompt I was not able to install a Master Boot Record (mbr) in Virtual PC's virtual disk partition and so the installation stopped dead.

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[ems2]

I wasn't sure if I should submit a story about SDL support in Plan 9. I will try an write up a summary about tomorrow. Lets see if it gets accepted.

PlanB (based on Plan9)

[ixra]

As an alternative to Plan9, you may try also PlanB, a distributed operating system based on Plan9.

Re:the mocking...

[HiThere]

I notice that you don't provide any pointers. Were I to believe that you were a representative of the Plan9 crowd it would, indeed, kill any interest I had in it. However I suspect you are merely a troll.

Why objects are not used in Plan 9

[Anonymous Coward]

The developers intentionally moved away from an everything is an object model for VERY good reasons. Files have well defined interfaces (read, write, etc) that make controlling your entire system with them far easier. In an object-based system, every object implements its own, non-uniform interface. If you want objects, look into Corba. It is much more complicated and not really more functional.

Ob. MST3K reference

[CmdrPorno]

Plan 9 isn't from Bell Labs, it's from Outer Space!

It's one of Ed Wood's finest pieces, featuring a strung-out Bela Lugosi.

EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction??

[Gerk]

does this still exist? When they "open sourced" it a few years ago I went to download it to give it a run through ... and it had a horrible EULA attached to downloading it. One of the most important terms (and forgive this as it's been a while so it's not verbatim) was that it was "not to be used to make weapons of mass destruction outside the US". Seemed to infer that it's ok in the US and in fact it is probably already being used thusly ...

I clicked I Don't Accept on the web page and have never gone back since.

Re:EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction??

[ems2]

hahaha... that one is long dead. The US Government required it so you should rather blame the US instead of its companies. If you look hard enough you will find that clause in a lot of places. It is still alive in the Lucent® Exptools Licensing. To quote:

LICENSEE acknowledges and agrees that the LICENSED SOFTWARE subject to this agreement is subject to the export control laws and regulations of the United States, including but not limited to the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), and sanction regimes of the U.S. Department of Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Controls. LICENSEE will comply with these laws and regulations. LICENSEE shall not, without prior U.S. Government authorization, export, re-export, or transfer any goods, software, or technology subject to this agreement, either directly or indirectly, to any country subject to a U.S. trade embargo or sanction (Cuba, N. Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan) or to any resident or national of said countries, or to any person, organization, or entity on any of the restricted parties lists maintained by the U.S. Departments of State, Treasury, or Commerce. In addition, any goods, software, or technology subject to this agreement may not be exported, re-exported, or transferred to any end-user engaged in activities, or for any end-use, directly or indirectly related to the design, development, production, use, or stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, e.g. nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, and the missile technology to deliver them.

IIRC Windows also has a similar clause.

Re:EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction??

[Shrithe]

That EULA no longer applies, it's legitimately open source now. That was back when Lucent still controlled it very carefully.

Re:EULA - Weapons of Mass Destruction??

[driddle]

They fixed the licence it is much better now. The Licence is now considered Free software see:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/plan-nine.html

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[despisethesun]

Plus, I have not yet seen a recent Slashdot story that said "Hey! There is this cool kernel called Linux, written by a Finnish programmer, Linus Torvalds. Check it out!"

No, but there are similar fluff articles about various Linux distros, only a handful of which are actually useful in the slightest. Your articles go back to 98, meaning you've listed less than one per year. Considering how many good ideas are in Plan 9 and how good of an example it could serve to the current crop of kernel hackers and OS geeks, it's worth bringing up from time to time and saying, "Hey, check this out."

We use it as our video servers' OS!

[StefanJ]

I wasn't around when it was ported, or ever learned why it was chosen, but a Plan 9 based OS called "Transit" runs on the video servers made by our company. The machines started out as general-purpose supercomputers, but after various shake-outs the hardware evolved into something optimized for storage and streaming.

All the real fun work was done ages ago. All we see is a csh-like shell. Perl and Apache and other basic tools were ported to it, which is nice.

Plan 9 deserves $30-$300 million in funding

[hansreiser]

So that it can achieve critical mass. We need more competition in the OS business, especially by folks who want more than to create yet another marketer driven hack. If we had serious funding for just a few research driven OS alternatives it would make such a difference to the economy. I'd also like to see Franz at MIT get some big funding too. Maybe our next president will invest into R&D....

Re:Plan 9 deserves $30-$300 million in funding

[andrewzx1]

Hi Hans, thanks for stopping in.

In your opinion, where do you think an "alternative" OS like Plan 9 would find its niche? If you had $30M to spend on Plan 9, how would you spend it specifically?

Re:Plan 9 deserves $30-$300 million in funding

[RLiegh]

Think about all the successful operating systems,

...do let's...

from C/PM

Valid point, independently developed; with you so far....

to DOS to

No real funding, and what did Patterson come up with? A glorified bootloader and crap rip-off of C/PM.
MS bought it and funded it for 14 years and developed it into...a glorified bootloader with a crappy rip-off
of the UNIX heirachal (sp?) file system and very rudimentary memory management.

BSD

..um, UC Berkely? DARPA? Hello!! They had funding out the Wazzoo! Some of it directly governmental (DARPA) or indirectly (government sponsorship
of the U of C).

  to Windows

Windows was wholly privately funded...and it shows. At least we're well past the BSODs., ...maybe it would have half-way decent security if it had to stand up to government (NSA) standards to any degree?

and the various Macs.

OS X goes back to BSD; no clue about the rest of them
....but weren't they all pretty much shit anyways? (cooperative multitasking anyone?)

The ones that were the most successful were also the ones that were the shittiest, and yes -were developed without government money.

BSD had plenty of government cash and the freedom to develop in whatever direction they wanted (as opposed to whatever direction the market
dictated) and as a result BSD is the best of the entire lot!

Re:Wow! I have never heard about this before!

[Zontar The Mindless]

I find it interesting that Plan 9 doesn't seem to work as a Live CD under VMWare, and that the developers complain that VMWare won't make the necessary info available when tonnes of Linux, BSD, and even Solaris live CDs work just fine.

I did find out via a couple of posts at OSNews that it might be possible to install Plan 9 under VMWare, but I've not yet had time to give that a try (need to clean up my hard disk first).

Unfair to Ed Woods

[Doug Merritt]

Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.

In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):

Later on, the acting jobs dried up, and Lugosi became addicted to morphine...Late in his life, he again received star billing in movies when filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., a fan of Lugosi, found him living in obscurity and near-poverty and offered him roles in his films, such as Glen or Glenda...in Bride of the Monster...and in Plan 9 From Outer Space [*]

( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)

Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.

Re:The /spot,SmartFunny people. Whois=(2Bell)Today

[SpecialBrownies]

"Congregations" went over my head. Sleep deprivation, and a hangover contribute today.This is Rare for me now, thankfully. I am serious though. Re reading it, it seems I may have sounded sarcastic, or somehow negative. Not my intent, at all. I do not have the kinds of skills of the Bell Labs people,or the best of the posters here. Those were significant people, who did significant things, a historic assembly of great minds. I genuinely admire these folks. For me,/. is an opportunity to sit across the table to listen. I think there is a modern equivalent of the old Bell Labs.It is harder to see it at present, of course. Somewhere,though it is happening. Clues of it are likely to show up here.

Oh, you *do* know Paul?

[leonbrooks]

This is just a history check. Think nothing of it. (-:

Why do "Plan 9 web browsers" have to exist?

[njdj]

Why can't you just recompile Firefox for Plan 9?

If there's some reason you can't take pretty much any open source application, and recompile it for Plan 9, then Plan 9 would a pointless waste of time.

I do not for a moment believe that Plan 9's creators would make such a stupid mistake.

Re:Why do "Plan 9 web browsers" have to exist?

[nuzak]

I can't recompile my Windows apps on Linux and have them just work. What a waste this Linux thing is. Who would use such a piece of junk?

Re:Why do "Plan 9 web browsers" have to exist?

[nuzak]

Firefox was specifically written to be portable. The history of Netscape is one of jumping through lots of hoops to create a portable runtime, and believe me there's a price to be paid (go check out what memory management is like under NSPR).

Now go compile a MFC or ATL app on Linux. Not that I would prefer to work with such junk (ATL isn't quite as bad, but that's only in a relative sense) but it still won't compile out of the box.

Plan 9 is a different operating system. Just because it's "more Unix than Unix" doesn't mean it's Unix. Or something like that ... mutter.

Re:This was out of beta long ago...

[TheVidiot]

Heh, idiot. I supposed the joke was lost on you, what with OS9 released some 22 years ago.